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Gaming news blog proposal
The Gaming Team had a great spontaneous brainstorming discussion about having a general gaming news blog. The purpose would be to eventually compete with established gaming news sites (IGN, GameSpot, Joystiq, etc) in order to keep visitors at Wikia. This page will document the ideas we have. At wikis such as Fallout, Dragon Age, and Red Dead, blogs have proven to be a great way to post news about games and allow for fans to comment, just like at traditional gaming news sites. So we started talking about creating a general gaming news blog to cover all games. We believe that this would not only eventually increase overall traffic, but keep visitors on Wikia longer. The question now is: how and where do we implement it? There are really only 2 places that would make sense - the new gaming hub and the old gaming hub. If both of those hubs are going to continue to exist, we say display the news on both. Since the old gaming hub is an actual wiki, the news blog could operate there, and the feed could also be displayed on the new gaming hub. We thought of a couple different ways to go about posting and moderating news, but we decided the best way would be to handle it the same way it's handled on the wikis where news blogs are successful, which is to add blog posts to Category:News to separate them from all other blog posts, then only display posts in the News category on the bloglist. Moderation Since even at the successful news blog wikis, hardly anyone other than admins knows that a blog post has to be added to the News category to show up on the News blog, the wikis have a sidebar menu option to Submit News, which is linked to Special:CreateBlogPage. Because admins can edit any blog post, the moderation of news is handled by admins simply deciding whether or not to add it to the News category. In the case where a post shows up on the News blog that doesn't belong, an admin can simply remove it from the News category. Tagging Ideally, we would also "tag" blog posts by game name using Category:Red Dead Redemption news for example, which is already working perfectly at the Fallout Wiki (on the sidebar - hover over News > Game news > and you can read all news blogs about any game in the series). All gaming news sites do this, such as this post at Joystiq. At the end of the article, there is a list of links next to Tags. Clicking on the Red-Dead-Redemption tag brings up a list of all articles related to the game. Crawl before you can walk Obiviously getting this to a level where it's comparable to a gaming news site won't happen overnight, but if it's handled the same way it was at the wikis previously mentioned (set it up, lead by example, show admins how to do it), then we are confident that, with time and plenty of promotion, we would have a good gaming news system that gives people a single place to get all the info they want about the games they love without having to leave Wikia to get it.